Quick Specs

Editors' Review

Here's a new way to launch a Web site: from your Firefox toolbar. With the Firefox extension Site Launcher, you can swap out your bookmarks for an overlay window of links you conjure at any time with a quick keyboard shortcut.

You customize your own list of go-to sites; a handful of presets helps streamline the process. Getting a further one-letter shortcut for each site, however, is the stroke of genius. Once we had those memorized, we skipped the menu entirely and pulled up new sites straight from the keyboard. A few visual options round out the extension.

Publisher's Description

+

From DoneSmart:
SiteLauncher is an add-on for Firefox that gives you a super-quick way to to open your favorite sites using keyboard shortcuts. A hotkey (Ctrl + Space is the default setting) brings up the 'Launcher', then simply press a single key to launch one of your favorite sites.
Examples:
Open Facebook by pressing Ctrl + Space F
Open Gmail by pressing Ctrl + Space M
Open Google by pressing Ctrl + Space G
Open Amazon by pressing Ctrl + Space A
And of course, you can create your own shortcuts using the Shortcut Manager (and also edit or delete the existing ones).
Save time by not having to retype or search for the same website URLs over and over.
Remember: The default hotkey for the Launcher is Ctrl + Space.
Feature highlights
* Because each site shortcut key is shown in the Launcher when you press the hotkey (Ctrl + Space is the default) you get the time saving benefit of keyboard shortcuts, without the downside of having to memorize them
* Default hotkey is customizable, in case you need it for something else.
* Add as many sites (URLs) to SiteLauncher as you want.
* Control by touch, mouse, or keyboard shortcuts
* Just about any character key can be associated with a site, you're not limited to letters and numbers
* Highly customizable appearance - change colors, text size, spacing, column size.
* Optional visual effects for the Launcher - transparency, icon reflections, rounded corners, and background gradients
* You can group related shortcuts together (e.g. create a Social Media group and put all your social media account shortcuts under it)
* Advanced user feature: SiteLauncher also supports bookmarklets - use shortcuts to perform quick Javascript actions
* You can have your site shortcuts automatically arranged or manually arranged in the order you want them to appear inside the Launcher
* Set Launcher to open sites in current or new tab
* Optionally, set Launcher to appear on startup instead of your homepage.

What's new in this version:

Version 2.6 Changes

Changed default Launcher style on first install; and default out-of-the-box shortcut set for new installs (does not affect upgrades)

Improved interface to make it quicker to create a new shortcut to the active page

Support for scrolling through Launcher by keyboard or (mouse was already supported) if/when available screen space is exceeded

My intent here is to 'review' the CNET editors' process rather than the product itself. Consequently, have given the product 3 stars so as not to unfairly skew the average rating.

Summary

Here's my issue 'CNET guys' : it's not the first time I've encountered positive and/or encouraging reviews and articles (this one, for cripes sake, is the lede story on today's download.com website) for products that are in beta, RC, or experimental status without that being indicated.

The Mozilla Add-on website makes it clear that this add-on is still considered experimental: "Experimental add-ons are meant for advanced users to test add-ons before they are made available and reviewed for general use. Many add-ons may be in prototype form. Experimental add-ons may be alpha, beta or pre-production in quality, performance and features.

Caution should be used when installing experimental add-ons, as they have not been tested by an editor and may harm your computer configuration."

Okay, many of us are willing to play around with software that's not yet production ready, but I think that part of CNET's responsibility is to make clear what it is touting. If the product is not out of beta, if it's still experimental, you need to let us know. If you can't be bothered, hey, I could use another job.

Browse your favorite websites at the touch of a buttonCustomize look and feel of program easilyEasy to understand Options

Cons

NONE...just make sure you go to the Firefox web page to install.

Summary

This program is great for having the sites that you browse at your fingertips anytime! You can configure this program to launch any of your most frequently launched websites with one key. You can customize the look of the launch screen as well. This program is like speed dial, but it doesn't require opening a tab. You can just press "ctrl" + "space" (and these can be configured as well) and the key assigned to the site you wish to visit.

This program does work and it can be downloaded. You should go to the Firefox website and download the program directly from there. You will have to log in as of the writing of this post because the add-on is experimental. But it works perfectly, and will help you browse more efficiently.

actually i will like to write to the other users maybe it helps about them questions!!!!! HOW TO INSTALL??ANSWER:download the file and move it by following thoose steps C:/programfiles/mozillafirefox/ after you paste the file in to the mozilla firefox file, klick right and say open with mozilla firefox then it is so easy to install!!! enjoy it :)))

Can't think of a Pro for a addon/extension that will only work with an outdated version of Firefox. Current version of Firefox is v3.0.5 and v3.1 is just around the corner. Maybe works good with Firefox 2, but not good enough to down grade Firefox.

Cons

Apparently only compatible with outdated version of Firefox.

Summary

I know that there are a lot of users still using Firefox 2, but at some point it is time to move on. Maybe the software author will update this addon/extension to work with Firefox 3 in the future. In the meantime, I will continue to use "Tidy Favorites" which is a richly featured bookmark program that is an external program, not an addon or extension, but works seamlessly with Firefox.

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Full Specifications

Changed default Launcher style on first install; and default out-of-the-box shortcut set for new installs (does not affect upgrades)

Improved interface to make it quicker to create a new shortcut to the active page

Support for scrolling through Launcher by keyboard or (mouse was already supported) if/when available screen space is exceeded

Improved preview feature in Options - you can now preview what the entire Launcher will look like before applying layout and appearance changes

Added feature to reload all shortcut icons - click any shortcut in Management view, then 'Change Icon', then 'Reload site's own icon for all sites' - helpful for when number of sites have updated their icons and SiteLauncher is still showing older ones

Internal changes to make fully compatible with latest Firefox versions